John Simkin
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There is a connection between WikiLeaks and the assassination of JFK. It is because of the link between the CIA and the overthrow of Fidel Castro.
The story begins when Miss A (Anna Ardin) invited Julian Assange to speak to a leftwing campaign group in the town of Enkoping. She invited him to spend the night at her flat. Both agree that consensual sex took place. The following day Arden introduced Assange to Miss W (Sofia Wilén). The couple went to the cinema where Wilén freely admits she performed oral sex on Assange. They then went back to her place where consensual sex took place that night and then again the following morning.
A few days later the two women went to a Stockholm police station where they said they were "seeking advice" on making a complaint against Assange. In the discussion that followed, Arden complained that the condom split while they were having sex and Assange did it on purpose. Wilén said they had unprotected sex without her consent. They were advised by the police officer that these allegations amounted to rape against Arden and sexual molestation against Wilén. The two women then leaked the story to a Swedish newspaper. Arden told Afonbladet that: "The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who had attitude problems with women."
Anna Ardin has an interesting background. In the past she has worked for the Swedish Embassy in the United States. Her university thesis, finished in 2007, was on Fidel Castro. This was then published by a CIA-funded anti-Castro group. It has also been pointed out that Sofia Wilén's partner is an American.
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Another important figure in British Socialism is Edward Carpenter. After being educated at the University of Cambridge he was ordained in 1870 and was appointed as curate to Frederick Denison Maurice, the leader of the Christian Socialist movement, who had a profound influence of Carpenter's political opinions.
Soon after Carptenter becoming a curate he joined the Republican Club, that led by Henry Fawcett, the husband of Millicent Fawcett, and the future leader of the NUWSS. It was later claimed that Carpenter despised the socially divisive capitalist system that allowed the ruling classes to live off the labour of the poor. During this time he became a vegetarian and a teetotaller.
By 1880 Carpenter had acknowledged his homosexuality and had moved in with Albert Fearnhough, a scythe riveter from Sheffield. When his father died in 1882 he left his son over £6,000. This enabled Carpenter to purchase a farm in Millthorpe, near Baslow in Derbyshire and to concentrate on his writing. Carpenter joined the Fellowship of the New Life, an organisation founded by Thomas Davidson. Other members included Havelock Ellis, Edith Lees, Edith Nesbit, Frank Podmore, Isabella Ford, Henry Hyde Champion, Hubert Bland, Edward Pease and Henry Stephens Salt. According to another member, Ramsay MacDonald, the group were influenced by the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Influenced by the work of John Ruskin, Carpenter began to develop ideas about a utopian future that took the form of a kind of primitive communism. By the 1880s Carpenter had established himself as a poet of democracy and socialism with books like Towards Democracy (1883). Over the next couple of years the book only sold 400 copies.
In March 1886 Carpenter established the Sheffield Socialist Society. Carpenter wrote that: "Our Sheffield Socialists organised lectures, addresses, pamphlets, with a street-corner propaganda which soon brought us in amusing and exciting incidents in the way of wrangles with the police and the town-crowds. At first an atmosphere of considerable suspicion rested upon the movement. Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men." According to his biographer, intellectuals such as Roger Fry, Charles Robert Ashbee and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson attended meetings which encouraged Carpenter that it was possible to reconcile culture and labour.
Edward Carpenter was also a member of the Fabian Society and in 1889 it published his Civilization: its Cause and Cure. In the book he argued that capitalism was a social and moral disease and condemned the industrial pollution that was taking place in Sheffield and other British towns and cities. He joined Peter Kropotkin in a study of small industries and defended anarchism in the courts. Carpenter also joined the Humanitarian League, an organisation created by Henry Salt. Carpenter took part in its campaigns against vivisection, the abolition of corporal and capital punishment, for prison reform and for the abolition of cruel sports.
In 1893 Carpenter joined with Keir Hardie, George Bernard Shaw, Tom Mann, H. H. Champion, Ben Tillett, Philip Snowden, and Ramsay Macdonald to form the Independent Labour Party. It was decided that the main objective of the party would be "to secure the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange".
Carpenter believed that homosexuality was innate and should not be classed as a sin. A strong advocate of sexual freedom, Carpenter wrote several pamphlets on the subject including Sex Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894), Women and her Place in a Free Society (1894), Marriage in a Free Society (1894) and Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1895).
After the House of Commons passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act that made all homosexual acts illegal, Carpenter had to abandon his campaign for sexual tolerance. In 1908 Carpenter returned to this theme with his book Intermediate Sex. Although the book created a great deal of hostility it had a strong influence on literary figures such as Siegfried Sassoon, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster.
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At the age of twenty-one Radclyffe Hall inherited a large sum of money that left in trust by her grandfather Charles Radclyffe-Hall. A lesbian, she lived with the singer Mabel Veronica Batten, who was twenty-five years her senior, until her death in 1916. Soon afterwards she began a relationship with Una Elena Troubridge (1887-1963), a talented sculptor. She was married to Admiral Ernest Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall sued him for libel after he described her as "a grossly immoral woman".
According to her biographer: "Believing herself a man trapped in a woman's body, she liked to be called John, assumed a male pseudonym (her father's name, significantly), and cultivated a strikingly masculine appearance, sporting cropped hair, monocles, bow-ties, smoking jackets, and pipes. A woman's best place, she proclaimed, was in the home."
In 1928 Radclyffe Hall published the novel, The Well of Loneliness, about the subject of lesbianism. The publisher, Jonathan Cape, argued on the bookjacket that: "In England hitherto the subject has not been treated frankly outside the regions of scientific text-books, but that its social consequences qualify a broader and more general treatment is likely to be the opinion of thoughtful and cultured people." There was a campaign by the press to get the book banned. The Sunday Express argued: "In order to prevent the contamination and corruption of English fiction it is the duty of the critic to make it impossible for any other novelist to repeat this outrage. I say deliberately that this novel is not fit to be sold by any bookseller or to be borrowed from any library."
Behind the scenes the Home Office put pressure of Jonathan Cape to withdraw the book. One official described the book as "inherently obscene… it supports a depraved practice and is gravely detrimental to the public interest". The chief magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, ordered that all copies be destroyed, and that literary merit presented no grounds for defence. The publisher agreed to withdraw the novel and proofs intended for a publisher in France were seized in October 1928.
Maude Royden, a woman preacher, gave passionate support for the book. A sermon on the subject was published in The Guildhall Monthly in April 1929. "I feel bound to say that I find it difficult to understand why an official who permits the publication of books so filthy that it soils the mind to read them, and the production of plays in which everything that is connected with sex is degraded, in which marriage and adultery alike are treated as though they were rather a nasty joke, should have fastened on this particular book as being unfit for us to read. I do not desire that those other books or plays should be suppressed; I have no faith at all in that way of dealing with evil. It is better to concentrate our efforts on trying to be interested in something that is good than to take a short cut to virtue by repressing what is evil."
Radclyffe Hall wrote to Maude Royden explaining her motivation for writing the novel: "May I take this opportunity of telling you how much your support of The Well of Loneliness has meant to its author during the past months of government persecution. I wrote the book in order to help a very much misunderstood and therefore unfortunate section of society, and to feel that a leader of thought like yourself had extended to me your understanding was, and still is, a source of strength and encouragement."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wradclyffe.htm
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James Naughtie, the veteran Today programme presenter, lost his composure on the BBC Radio 4 show after he stumbled over the pronunciation of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary.
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Olive Schreiner's novel was rejected by several publishers. In 1883 she was introduced to George Meredith who worked as a reader for the publishers, Chapman & Hall. She showed him the novel about life in South Africa. He was very impressed and the Story of an African Farm was published later that year. The novel tells the story of Lyndall, a woman living on an isolated ostrich farm. The book was praised by feminists who approved of the strong heroine who controls her own destiny. Acclaimed by the critics, the book sold well in both Britain and America. W.T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, claimed that Schreiner was "the only woman of genius South Africa has ever produced".
Her biographer, Joyce Avrech Berkman, has argued: "The Story of an African Farm wrestles with her most painful childhood and adolescent experiences. Focused on two primary figures, the novel mingles linear sequences, flashbacks, extended allegories, authorial moralizing, comic and introspective passages, and haunting descriptions of the South African Karoo... Through the poetic spirit of Waldo the novel depicts the terrifying stages of a young person's loss of Christian faith and his search for spiritual and moral direction within a world of natural and human cruelty inseparable from goodness and beauty."
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In 1906 Rudolph Ihlee went to the Slade School of Fine Art. He made friends with a group of very talented students. This included C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, John S. Currie, Mark Gertler, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Adrian Allinson and Edward Wadsworth.
This group became known as the Coster Gang. According to David Boyd Haycock this was "because they mostly wore black jerseys, scarlet mufflers and black caps or hats like the costermongers who sold fruit and vegetables from carts in the street".
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During the Second World War, Adrian Allinson was selected as a government war artist by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) and his contribution to the Dig For Victory home front food campaign in his picture: The AFS Dig For Victory in St James’s Square (1942).
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During the First World War the artist Edward Wadsworth served the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an intelligence officer on the Greek island of Mudros. Later he was employed on the dazzle camouflage campaign. This was a paint scheme used on ships during the war consisting of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other. It did not conceal the ship but made it difficult for the enemy to estimate its type, size and speed. The idea was to disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery.
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In December, 1910, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot met Lilian Kate Thompson, an artist’s model. They became engaged a few months later but his parents disapproved and advised him to wait before marrying. Adrian Allinson claimed she was "notoriously promiscuous", but his love for her had blinded him to what was "common knowledge to us all".
On 27th September 1911 Lightfoot planned to travel with Thompson to Liverpool to meet his parents. However, that morning their was a disagreement and he cut his throat with a razorblade in his 13 Fitzroy Road lodgings, in Primrose Hill. His friend, C.R.W. Nevinson argued that he was struck by the callous attitude of his friend's bereaved fiancee: "I felt bewildered when I witnessed the natural pride of the woman because a man had died for her."
The inquest passed a verdict of "Suicide whilst of Unsound Mind". Despite the fact that he was preparing for an exhibition of his work to be held at the Carfax Gallery, no paintings were found in his studio after his death and it is possible that Lightfoot destroyed them all before killing himself. On announcing his death, The Times claimed that: "All artists and critics.... were united in believing that Lightfoot would enjoy a most distinguished career in the highest rank of painting". Michael Sadleir considered Lightfoot's early death "a disaster to art in England."
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It is not a question of paying money for extra bandwidth. I have done this several times but we still end up with the same problem. When we have complained before about this before, we are told that we have been victims of "denial of service" attacks. What happens is that our enemies use software that demands constant delivery of pages. The only way of dealing with this is to ban the IP of those doing it. However, you need someone to spend a lot of time observing what is happening. Andy Walker used to do this when he was an administrator. I am afraid I do not have time to do it. Any volunteers?
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers. The term is generally used with regards to computer networks, but is not limited to this field, for example, it is also used in reference to CPU resource management.
One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.
Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB's Internet proper use policy, and also violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.
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One of the reasons that young women turned to lesbianism was the fear of pregnancy. Dorothy Brett was an artist who in 1922 had an affair with John Middleton Murry. She thought she was pregnant and wrote to a friend: "I am afraid I have struggled through a terrible time of depression... The worry, the fear exhausts me... I feel, as I suppose every woman feels, that the burden is all left to me. Murry can turn from one woman to another while I have to face the beastliness of an illegal operation - or the long strain of carrying a child and perhaps death - not that I mind the last - it might be the best way out if I am not strong enough to stand alone." Murry arranged an abortion for Brett but she miscarried before she had the operation. After this she became a lesbian.
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One of the strangest members of the Bloomsbury Group was David (Bunny) Garnett. He went to live with his lover, Duncan Grant, and his mistress, Vanessa Bell, the wife of Clive Bell, at Wissett Lodge in Suffolk in 1914. Later they moved to Charleston Farmhouse, near Firle. As Hermione Lee, the author of Virginia Woolf (1996), points out: "Vanessa, who had fallen in love with Duncan Grant before the start of the war, was painting in a farm-cottage on the Sussex coast, living in an uneasy triangle with Duncan and his new lover, David (known as Bunny) Garnett. In 1918 Bell gave birth to Grant's child, Angelica Bell. Garnett wrote to Lytton Strachey shortly afterwards, "I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?".
On 30th March 1921 Garnett married Rachel (Ray) Marshall. The couple had two sons. In 1922 Garnett published the highly successful novel, Lady Into Fox. The money he made from this book enabled him to buy Hilton Hall, an early seventeenth-century house near Huntingdon. In 1923 he joined forces with Francis Meynell to establish the Nonesuch Press.
In 1938 Garnett began an affair with Angelica Bell. This greatly distressed her parents. Garnett's wife died of breast cancer in 1940 and he married Angelica on 8th May 1942 and over the next few years had four children (Amaryllis, Henrietta, Nerissa and Frances).
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Several members of the Bloomsbury Group denied the group actually existed. While it is true that they never established an organisation with this name. Nor did they issue a manifesto or membership cards. However, several members did refer to the group of friends as the "Bloomsbury Group". They also had a significant influence on the arts during the first 30 years of the 20th Century.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTbloomsburyG.htm
After the death of their father, Leslie Stephen in 1904, his daughters Virginia Stephen and Vanessa Stephen moved to Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury. Their brother, Thoby Stephen, introduced them to some of his friends that he had met at the University of Cambridge. The group began meeting to discuss literary and artistic issues. The friends included Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, David Garnett, Desmond MacCarthy, Mary MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, Arthur Waley and Saxon Sydney-Turner.
Ottoline Morrell also lived in Bloomsbury and in December 1908, had tea with Vanessa Stephen and Virginia Stephen at their home in Fitzroy Square. Virginia was especially impressed with Ottoline and confessed to Violet Dickinson that their relationship was like "sitting under a huge lily, absorbing pollen like a seduced bee." Vanessa believed that Ottoline was bisexual and that she was physically attracted to her sister. In her memoirs, Ottoline admitted that she was entranced by Virginia: "This strange, lovely, furtive creature never seemed to me to be made of common flesh and blood. She comes and goes, she folds her cloak around her and vanishes, having shot into her victim's heart a quiverful of teasing arrows." The women became close friends and from then on Morrell was considered by some to be a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
In 1910 Clive Bell met Roger Fry in a railway carriage between Cambridge and London. Later, Virginia Stephen recalled: "It must have been in 1910 I suppose that Clive one evening rushed upstairs in a state of the highest excitement. He had just had one of the most interesting conversations of his life. It was with Roger Fry. They had been discussing the theory of art for hours. He thought Roger Fry the most interesting person he had met since Cambridge days. So Roger appeared. He appeared, I seem to think, in a large ulster coat, every pocket of which was stuffed with a book, a paint box or something intriguing; special tips which he had bought from a little man in a back street; he had canvases under his arms; his hair flew; his eyes glowed."
From then on Roger Fry became a very important member of the Bloomsbury Group. Robert Trevelyan, an art collector, began buying Fry's work. Trevelyan told Paul Nash that "Fry was without doubt the high priest of art of the day, and could and did make artistic reputations overnight." In the summer of 1910, Fry and two other members of the group, Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy went to Paris and after visiting "Parisian dealers and private collectors, arranging an assortment of paintings to exhibit at the Grafton Galleries" in Mayfair. This included a selection of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, André Derain and Vincent Van Gogh. As the author of Crisis of Brilliance (2009) has pointed out: "Although some of these paintings were already twenty or even thirty years old - and four of the five major artists represented were dead - they were new to most Londoners." This exhibition had a marked impression on the work of several English artists, including Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Spencer Gore.
The critic for The Pall Mall Gazette described the paintings as the "output of a lunatic asylum". Robert Ross of The Morning Post agreed claiming the "emotions of these painters... are of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality". These comments were especially hurtful to Fry as his wife had recently been committed to an institution suffering from schizophrenia. Paul Nash recalled that he saw Claude Phillips, the art critic of The Daily Telegraph, on leaving the exhibition, "threw down his catalogue upon the threshold of the Grafton Galleries and stamped on it."
According to Hermione Lee, the author of Virginia Woolf (1996): "Those who belonged to it (Bloomsbury Group) said that it was a figment, or that it was too diverse to be categorisable. The origins of the term, as applied to a number of like-minded friends living in a particular area of London and involved mainly with the arts and politics are disputed. It seems to have started being used, as a joke, in 1910."
In 1913 Roger Fry joined with two other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to form the Omega Workshops in 1913. Other artists involved included Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Frederick Etchells. Fry's biographer, Anne-Pascale Bruneau has argued that: "It was an ideal platform for experimentation in abstract design, and for cross-fertilization between fine and applied arts.... However, in spite of a number of commissions for interior design, the company survived the war years with difficulty, and closed in 1919.
According to Hermione Lee, the author of Virginia Woolf (1996): "Those who belonged to it (Bloomsbury Group) said that it was a figment, or that it was too diverse to be categorisable. The origins of the term, as applied to a number of like-minded friends living in a particular area of London and involved mainly with the arts and politics are disputed. It seems to have started being used, as a joke, in 1910."
Philip Morrell and Ottoline Morrell purchased Garsington Manor near Oxford at the beginning of the First World War and it became a refuge for conscientious objectors. They worked on the property's farm as a way of escaping prosecution. It also became a meeting place for the Bloomsbury Group.
In 1917, Lytton Strachey set up home with Dora Carrington at Mill House, Tidmarsh, in Berkshire. Julia Strachey was a regular visitor to the house. In 1918 both Strachey and Carrington began an affair with Ralph Partridge. According to his biographer, Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum, they created: "A polygonal ménage that survived the various affairs of both without destroying the deep love that lasted the rest of their lives. Strachey's relation to Carrington was partly paternal; he gave her a literary education while she painted and managed the household. Ralph Partridge... became indispensable to both Strachey, who fell in love with him, and Carrington." Carrington and Partridge, both became members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Vanessa Bell lived with Duncan Grant and David Garnett, first at Wissett Lodge in Suffolk, then at Charleston Farmhouse, near Firle, where he undertook farm work until the end of the war. In 1918 Bell gave birth to Grant's child, Angelica Garnett. His biographer, Quentin Bell has argued: "Despite various homosexual allegiances in subsequent years, Grant's relationship with Vanessa Bell endured to the end; it became primarily a domestic and creative union, the two artists painting side by side, often in the same studio, admiring but also criticizing each other's efforts."
Frances Marshall, who later married Ralph Partridge, also became a member of the Bloomsbury Group. She later recalled in her autobiography, Memories (1981): "They were not a group, but a number of very different individuals, who shared certain attitudes to life, and happened to be friends or lovers. To say they were unconventional suggests deliberate flouting of rules; it was rather that they were quite uninterested in conventions, but passionately in ideas. Generally speaking they were left-wing, atheists, pacifists in the First World War, lovers of the arts and travel, avid readers, Francophiles. Apart from the various occupations such as writing, painting, economics, which they pursued with dedication, what they enjoyed most was talk - talk of every description, from the most abstract to the most hilariously ribald and profane."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jwoolf.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JbellV.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JstephenT.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JbellC.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUkeynes.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUwoolf.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTstracheyL.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jgarnett.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTfryR.htm
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Some tracks from Jennifer Warnes:
First We Take Manhattan
Song Of Bernadette
Famous Blue Raincoat
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For many years Edward Marsh was Mark Gertler's patron. However, the two men fell out over the First World War. Gertler wrote to on 17th August 1915: "I have come to the conclusion that we two are too fundamentally different to continue friends. Since the war, you have gone in one direction and I in another. All the time I have been stifling my feelings. Firstly because of your kindness to me and secondly I did not want to hurt you. I am I believe what you call a 'Passivist'. I don't know exactly what that means, but I just hate this war and should really loathe to help in it."
Edward Marsh, who had forgiven Mark Gertler for his pacifism, continued to buy his paintings even though he admitted he no longer liked or understood his work. In 1939 Gertler had his last exhibition. It was not a great success. Gertler wrote to Marsh: "I'm afraid I am depressed about my show - I've sold only one so far... it's very disheartening." Marsh replied that he no longer liked Gertler's paintings. Gertler tried to explain his situation: "Obviously a number of other people feel as you do about my recent work... I can never set out to please - my greatest spiritual pleasure in life is to paint just as I feel impelled to do at the time... But to set out to please would ruin my process." The following month Gertler committed suicide in his studio.
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Edward Howard Marsh was educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, where he obtained first classes in both parts of the classical tripos (1893–5). On the death of an uncle in 1903, Marsh inherited a large sum of money. Three years later he received a share of the government money paid to the descendants of Spencer Perceval. Marsh decided to use this money to start a fund for the patronage of the arts. With the help of his friend, Neville Lytton, he purchased some paintings by Thomas Girtin, Paul Sandby and John Sell Cotman. Marsh was also a great supporter of modern poetry. After writing a good review of the work of Rupert Brooke in the Poetry Review, the two men became close friends.
In 1905 Winston Churchill invited Marsh to become his private secretary. According to his biographer, Christopher Hassall: "For the next twenty-three years Marsh was at Churchill's right hand whenever he was in office. He toured British East Africa, Uganda, and Egypt with him in 1907–8, and served with him successively at the Board of Trade (1908–10), the Home Office (1910–11), the Admiralty (1911–15), and, from May to November 1915, the duchy of Lancaster."
In December 1911, he ignored the advice of Neville Lytton to buy a painting by Duncan Grant. Marsh later recalled that he decided to reject the advice of buying acknowledged masterpieces from the main Mayfair dealers. He said he found it much more exciting "to go to the studios and the little galleries, and purchase, wet from the brush, the possible masterpieces of the possible Masters of the future."
He also became interested in the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He later introduced Marsh to Mark Gertler and John S. Currie. Marsh gradually got to know a group of artists at the Slade School known as the Coster Gang. This included Gertler, Currie, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, Edward Wadsworth, Adrian Allinson and Rudolph Ihlee.
Marsh was a homosexual and as David Boyd Haycock, the author of A Crisis of Brilliance (2009) has pointed out: "Marsh's keenness for painting was matched only by his passions for poetry and handsome young men." He became very attached to Gertler who he took to the theatre. He told Rupert Brooke: "Gertler is by birth an absolute little East End Jew. Directly I can get about I am going to see him in Bishopsgate and be initiated into the Ghetto. He is rather beautiful, and has a funny little shine black fringe."
Currie was invited by Marsh to dinner at Gray's Inn. He brought Dolly Henry with him and Marsh described her as "an extremely pretty Irish girl with red hair". The following day Marsh wrote to Rupert Brooke: "Currie came yesterday I have conceived a passion for both him and Gertler, they are decidedly two of the most interesting of les jeunes, and I can hardly wait till you come back to make their acquaintance."
Mark Gertler and John S. Currie now became Marsh's artistic mentors. They argued that he should buy the work of their friend, Stanley Spencer. Marsh told Brooke: "They both admire Spencer more than anyone else. Gertler was to have taken me to see him (at Cookham) tomorrow, but it's had to be put off... I shall be buying some pictures soon! I think I told you I was inheriting £200 from a mad aunt aged 90, it turns out to be nearer four hundred than two! So I'm going to have my rooms done up and go a bust in Gertler, Currie and Spencer."
Edward Marsh met Spencer and eventually purchased the Apple Gatherers for 50 guineas. Marsh told Brooke that he had hung the painting in his spare bedroom. "I can't bring myself really to acquiesce in the false proportions, though in every other respect I think it magnificent." He added that Spencer "has a charming face" and that "we got on like houses on fire."
In August 1913 Marsh decided to spend an inheritance from an aunt on paintings by John S. Currie, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer. He also purchased the work of John Nash and Paul Nash. By 1914 he had one of the most valuable collections of modern work in private hands in his apartment at 5 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn.
Edward Marsh, who never married, died on 13th January 1953 in his flat in Knightsbridge flat. On his death The Times described him as "the last individual patron of the arts". However, the question needs to be asked, was he more interested in the sexual favours of these artists than in their paintings.
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Posted by Kristy Sturdivant:
It’s been reported that Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star in and produce the film LEGACY OF SECRECY about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The book was written by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann entitled Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination. DiCaprio will most likely play the FBI informant Jack Van Laningham who became a confidant to Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello who apparently ordered the assassination of JFK. Warner Bros is looking for a release date sometime in 2013 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.This sounds fascinating and I can’t think of anyone better to play such a role. After DiCaprio’s amazing turn in INCEPTION I can’t imagine that he won’t get an Oscar nod. However, if the Academy shuns him (again) this year at least he has this piece coming up. Although it really would be a shame if he had to wait until the 2014 Academy Awards.http://www.flix66.com/2010/11/19/leonardo-dicaprio-takes-on-jfk-film/
Also from Variety: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118027763?refCatId=13
I know very few people are convinced by Lamar Waldron's theories but such a film will create a new debate on the subject.
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John. I'm always interested in other persons critique of art and artists and would very much appreciate a statement of why you hold Currie in such high regard (his paintings of course). There seem to be very few if any high quality reproductions of his art on the web. I'd like to see some.
I wonder what he meant with including the word primitive in the name of the first painting.
John Currie was a member of a small group of British artists (often called the Coster Gang) who were trying to respond to the competition of the camera. Currie's "super realism" was way beyond his time and mirrored what happened in the 1960s. It would have been interesting to see how he would have responded to the First World War. His friends from the Coster Gang, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spenser and C.R.W. Nevinson, all changed direction as a result of their reactions to the conflict.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTnevinson.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTgertler.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTspencer.htm
If I had to predict his future direction I would suggest he would have followed Spencer and painted pictures like this:
http://badarthistory.blogspot.com/2009/09/stanley-spencer.html
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John S. Currie is one of my favourite artists. In 1914 it was believed he would be one of Britain's greatest artists. Then he murdered his girlfriend and committed suicide. You can see a couple of his paintings and a photograph of the woman who he killed.
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Now, we're being told that Grant has 3 days to save his job. I'm hoping that is just paper talk as I've never believed chopping and changing the manager is good practise.
I do hope they don't sack Grant.
Been working hard - apologies for not joining in the debate. I am amazed West Ham offered Grant a job. Aside from being a co-religionist friend of Abrhamovic; Grant is a non-entity in terms of managerial ability, lest one similarly views David Jeffery at Linfield as a top manager. Grant is totally out of his depth. Whilst I don't like chopping and changing managers - I suspect Grant was only brought in because he was cheap.
Avram Grant is one of the worst top flight managers in the history of the Premier League. Despite having no track record in management nor licenses as required to manage in the PL - he got a job at Chelsea, (see relationship with powerful Abrahamovic), where he won nothing. He went to a decent side (albeit financially in trouble) at Portsmouth where he won nothing. He is at West Ham where he will win nothing. He has spent 365 days at the bottom of the League.
He did drop Carlton Cole - which must mean he knows something about football. He does play Herita Ilunga, Mark Noble and Boa Morte which more than negates any kudos from dropping Carlton Cole.
Truth is our squad is OK and if managed well should survive in the PL. Our manager is pathetic. The players are not playing well as a team - we have no pace, no holding midfielder and no out and out goalscorer. I have no idea how we right this, my first move would be to bring a proper manager and I have no idea who that is!
I still think West Ham is a better team than we were last season. We have not lost too many, the problem is that most of the games have finished as draws. I still think we can beat the drop with Grant. Even so, unless he is out of the relegation zone by Christmas he will be sacked. The rumour is that he will be replaced by Neil Warnock .
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This is why the UK needs to protect itself from Chinese imports. Here are the latest trade figures (September 2010)
Value of exports are followed by imports.
United States: £3,294m (£2,339m)
Germany: £2,269m (£3,822m)
France: £1,583m (£1,858m)
Netherlands: £1,571m (£2,192m)
Irish Republic: £1,442m (£936m)
Belgium: £1,119m (£1,567)
Spain: £874m (£762m)
China: £735m (£2,633m)
Italy: £686m (£1,072m)
No wonder the UK government is considering helping the Irish. The combined exports that we have with China, Russia, Brazil and India is less than what we export to Ireland.
I would be interested in seeing the trade figures for the United States. I had no idea that we had a trade surplus with the United States. No wonder some of you are in favour of protectionism.
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On the outbreak of the First World War Gerald Brenan was commissioned into the 5th Battalion Gloucester Regiment and served on the Western Front at Ypres, Passchendaele, and the Somme. While in the army he met Ralph Partridge, and the two men became great friends. A brave soldier, he won the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre during the war.
In 1919 Brenan decided to move to Spain and rented a little house in the village of Yegen in the Alpujarras district of the province of Granada. According to his biographer: "Here he began life in his adopted country, devoting himself to reading, walking immense distances in the mountains, and writing quantities of long and brilliant letters."
Brenan made regular visits to England. His friend, Ralph Partridge worked for Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Partridge was soon an accepted member of the Bloomsbury Group. Brenan also joined the group that also included Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy and Arthur Waley.
Another member, Frances Marshall, later recalled in her autobiography, Memories (1981): "They were not a group, but a number of very different individuals, who shared certain attitudes to life, and happened to be friends or lovers. To say they were unconventional suggests deliberate flouting of rules; it was rather that they were quite uninterested in conventions, but passionately in ideas. Generally speaking they were left-wing, atheists, pacifists in the First World War, lovers of the arts and travel, avid readers, Francophiles. Apart from the various occupations such as writing, painting, economics, which they pursued with dedication, what they enjoyed most was talk - talk of every description, from the most abstract to the most hilariously ribald and profane."
Dora Carrington set up home with Lytton Strachey at Mill House, Tidmarsh, in Berkshire. This became one of the main centres for the Bloomsbury Group. In 1918 Ralph Partridge began an affair with both Carrington and Strachey. According to his biographer, Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum, they created: "A polygonal ménage that survived the various affairs of both without destroying the deep love that lasted the rest of their lives. Strachey's relation to Carrington was partly paternal; he gave her a literary education while she painted and managed the household. Ralph Partridge... became indispensable to both Strachey, who fell in love with him, and Carrington."
Ralph Partridge married Dora Carrington in 1921. Dora wrote to Lytton Strachey on her honeymoon: "So now I shall never tell you I do care again. It goes after today somewhere deep down inside me, and I'll not resurrect it to hurt either you or Ralph. Never again. He knows I'm not in love with him... I cried last night to think of a savage cynical fate which had made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you. You never knew, or never will know the very big and devastating love I had for you ... I shall be with you in two weeks, how lovely that will be. And this summer we shall all be very happy together."
In 1924 Partridge and Strachey bought Ham Spray House in Ham, Wiltshire, where a studio was made for Carrington and a library for Strachey. Julia Strachey, who visited her at Ham Spray House, recalls: "From a distance she (Carrington) looked a young creature, innocent and a little awkward, dressed in very odd frocks such as one would see in some quaint picture-book; but if one came closer and talked to her, one soon saw age scored around her eyes - and something, surely, a bit worse than that - a sort of illness, bodily or mental. She had darkly bruised, hallowed, almost battered sockets."
Brenan was a regular visitor to Ham Spray House when he was in England. Frances Marshall later recalled: "Gerald Brenan, a great friend of Ralph's from the war, and here it was that Gerald and Carrington - who had met before, and indulged in a light flirtation - finally fell in love. The feeling was deep on Gerald's side, and they had a good deal in common; but Ralph was quite unsuspicious, merely delighted that they were getting on so well together, and unaware of their secret meetings and love-making."
His biographer has argued: "His love affair with Dora Carrington was far the most serious in his life, producing as it did an enormous two-way correspondence, some ecstasy, and considerable unhappiness on both sides. Otherwise he was obsessed by sex, and inhibited by fears of impotence. A stream of prostitutes, hippies, and peasant girls occupied his agitated thoughts and feelings and directed his travels."
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Frances Partridge wrote in her autobiography, Memories (1981):
Why, I wonder, have writers paid so little honour to friendship? Sustaining, warming, refreshing and endlessly stimulating, it should surely have had almost as many poems written to it as have been dedicated to love. Yet I search anthologies and often find none.
Blood is thicker... well, in a sense it is true, but love of family is genetic and static in comparison: one is born possessing it, and though it may persist staunchly, and of course rates a plus sign in the vital arithmetic, its capacity for development is limited. The exciting truth about friendship is that it is founded on choice; its possibilities of growth and change are manifold. It fertilises the soil of one's life, sends up fresh shoots, encourages cross-pollination and the creation of new species.
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John, I do not suspect it matters much how much U.S. government debt the Chinese government holds, at least in the near future. Compare the leverage on U.S foreign policy that the influence of the high dollar amount of this Chinese government "investment" actually brings to Chinese officials, to the fealty exhibited by American federal office holders and major media towards the priorities of the government of Israel and its likud party leaders and their agenda, and whatever growth of Chinese leverage is not noticeable.
There was a joke distributed by the media recently on the occasion of the opening of a new Apple store in Beijing. The crux of it was that the youthful Chinese workers who actually manufacture the iPhone would be able to buy it at the new store.
Over the past 25 years, the "barge" that GE's Jack Welch descrined two decades ago as being outfitted as a production plant, traveling from port to
port of the lowest cost city and country of labor and least stringent labor and environmental laws and oversight, would temporarily get to host the barge in its ports and "enjoy" the jobs opporunities offered.
American based production equipment, especially, was literally unbolted from the factory floors and packed for shipment by the workers who had recently been the operators or it. This equipment was shipped to Mexico for a time until the owners of it decided the $2.00 per hour wage paid to Mexican workers was unattractive compared to paying half the amount to more productive and more docile Asian workers.
Recently, Chinese electronic assembly planst have been moving their factories from coastal Chinese cities to more remote inland provinces in newly built cities designed as a plan to prevent remote, rural workers from seeking their fortunes in already dramatically overcrowded places like Beijing and Shanghai.
Unless there is rapid improvement in the wealth and expectations of the American consumer class which I doubt can happen, China will suffer the effects of declining or stagnant demand and the tendency of those seeking cheap labor to shift more attention to Vietnam and evetually even to North Korea.
China needs those who seek cheap abundant labor more than those who seek that labor. I think that government is ever mindful and distracted by
the pressure of seeking ways to provide better opportunities to its massive and dissatisfied rural majority of "have nots." The government has no legitmacy and must constantly justify its hold on power by whatever means necessary, with an alliance of a military that may have morphed into a giant industrial conglomerate with its own agenda.
The Chinese are locked into bonds yielding a historically low interest rate, for a relatively long term it the portfolio averages five plus years to maturity. Since I believe deflation is the most probable near term trend, it is a trend that is the friend of the U.S. government as it services its debt mountain and interest rates still trending downward.
U.S. outstanding credit had not trended down since WWII, and is now in its third year of a contracting trend. The largest former outlet for creation
of new money in the American fractional reserve banking scheme, was mortgage lending. There is no sign of a recovery coming from their.
Last year, the Federal Reserve issued its usual reports on who was buying U.S. treasury bonds, and more than $600 billion of bond purchases came from a category that the Fed describes as "various households". This is a euphemism, since it was an increase in purchasing from that source of
about ten times the previous year, for what the Fed is openly doint now, "buying" $600 billion in new issues of this bond debt with money coming into existance through what amounts as a ledger entry, just as loan debt used to be funded with ledger entries on the books of the lending, fractional reserve banks.
As Paul Krugman has recently written, the federal stimulus and increased borrowing has still not offset the contraction in the money supply caused by the shrinking outstanding debt base caused by the paying down of debt, loan balances disappearing through defaults, and by less new lending.
The lack of lending, while the "haves" all over the world grow even wealthier, causes the deflation the Fed is so intent on trying to offset by its relentless quantitative easing. Concentrated wealth seeking higher returns in the first half of this decade caused the move into mortgage backed securities, and now it looks like bubbles have formed in gold, silver, and in G7 stock markets.
I think the Chinese government will stay distracted by the possibility of internal unrest, and will do nothing much to pressure the U.S. until China gives up on the resurgence of the U.S. consumer to stimulate employment in China. I do not see a rise in the level of consumer demand of the populations of India and China to the extent that it will even their import export balances. I expect aging U.S., Japanese, and western European populations to influence stagnation of consumer spending.
I expect the Euro and the Yen to weaken more rapidly than the dollar and make the dollar look better, as happened six months ago. Japanese government debt is at least twice the per capita level in the U.S., all factors considered.
I think U.S. defense, imports, and monetary policy will continue on a bold and reckless course, and get away with it, for a lot longer into
the future than most could have expected, with little advancement in energy conservation or emission reduction, especially if we are early now
in a period of republican party resurgance.
My expectations are set up so I will be surprised if what should logically be the consequences of all that has come to seemingly wreck the dollar and American hegemony, actually results in diminishing it, or the dollar, much at all. The bottom 80 percent round the world will grow even poorer and the top one percent will siphon up what little wealth the majority still cling to it. The majority have voted for this to happen, or capitulated to it by failing to rise up against thugs like the rulers of the Chinese, the Mexicans, and the Russians.
Canada and Belize look like the best places in this neighborhood to consider relocating to.
Tom, what you describe is a more extreme form of what is happening in the UK.
What is interesting is that it is the so-called "communist" states that have the best record of keeping labour costs very low (that is because they control the trade unions). In fact, what you have in China is more like a fascist or state capitalist system.
I think the only answer to the problem is protectionism. It will create inflation but it will reduce unemployment in the advanced economies.
WikiLeaks and the JFK Asassination
in JFK Assassination Debate
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I notice that she has deleted those entries about how you gain sexual revenge on men.